A most ordinary, yet profound, question of life greets us upon the next generation’s entrance into the world—do you know what it is? Girl or boy? And often enough, the expecting parents answer that big question via a gender reveal party. Be it a cake, a scratch-off ticket, or balloons, the color says it all: blue for boy and pink for girl.

So when a Minnesota shop bungled the reveal by supplying the prospective parents with a box full of multi-colored balloons, the expecting couple was properly perplexed. After all, it’s not that complicated: blue equals boy; pink equals girl. One can only imagine what the couple said to the shop, but at least the shop got it right on the second effort: a baby boy is on the way, as announced by blue balloons cascading out of the freshly opened box.

The television station called the cascade of multi-colored balloons a “hilarious” mistake. But if the proponents of gender identity ideology get their way, what is hilarious today will become mandatory tomorrow. For according to gender identity advocates, whatever sex you may temporarily “assign” to your newborn child, you need to mark time before you truly reveal the child’s “gender.” After all, they say, a child won’t form its own “gender identity” until it is between two and five years old.

But be careful here—don’t let your “binary bias” mislead you into thinking that once your child gets to the magic age that they will then decide for themselves whether they are simply a “boy” or a “girl.” Reducing sex to the binary male/female categories violates gender identity ideology, which dictates that your child may not only decide to be a male or female, but may also discern that they are actually a male-to-female (MTF) or female-to-male (FTM) transgender person.

Or if that doesn’t quite fit, then there’s a rainbow of options: genderqueer, genderfluid, androgynous, bigender, pangender, ambigender, non-gendered, agender, intergender, third gender. And if, despite wise guidance from the Genderbread Person they still can’t figure it out what gender they are, they can always pick “another identity altogether.”

As nonsensical as this all is, the advocates of gender identity theory relentlessly demand that everyone must affirm their perceived identity—even bending sex nondiscrimination law into a tool to affirm subjective misperceptions of sex.

The premise is deceptively simple: if a young student thinks that they are the opposite sex, they must be treated in all ways as they think they are, regardless of the biological fact of being male or female. Thus, you as a parent must accept the teenage boy in your daughter’s locker room, or the girl bunking with the boys on an overnight school trip. And yes, when your daughter tries out for the girls’ wrestling team, she may find herself wrestling another girl who, thinking that she must become a boy, has been dosed with performance-enhancing testosterone.

But just as the balloon shop finally got it right, there are signs that our culture is rejecting gender identity ideology:

A recent report in The New Atlantis broadly demonstrated that conclusions drawn from the scientific literature frequently oversimplify the complex questions that arise from the data. There is no concrete support for the claims of the LGBT narrative.

At UT Austin, a leading researcher in human sexuality revealed serious—perhaps fatal—flaws in a keynote study that has long been used to justify special treatment for sexual minorities.

Even proponents of the ideology are questioning the ethics of blocking puberty and administering cross-sex hormones to young children who—but for that “therapy”—would almost certainly realign with their birth sex as they pass through puberty.

Indeed, gender identity ideology is so far afield that it has unified voices ranging from Catholic mothers to Jewish feminists to oppose the ideology because it undercuts protections for women in our society.

Thankfully, President Trump has rectified the federal government overreach by rescinding an Obama-era letter demanding that schools open locker rooms and similar facilities to students of the opposite sex. He has enabled local school boards once again to protect the dignity and privacy rights of all their students.

But the school districts still will face a determined attack from groups like the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and a host of other well-funded groups seeking to impose gender identity ideology on Americans. That is why ADF will continue fighting for common sense and privacy, so that your sons and daughters are able to use their locker room, school shower, or hotel rooms on field trips without discovering the opposite sex in their midst.

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